Regenerative Medicine Hub at W-S Innovation Quarter keeps growing with new addition

Editor’s note: Each week WRAL TechWire focuses its Innovation Thursday report on companies, people and technology that could make a big difference in our collective future.

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RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK – A Georgia company that specializes in placental biologics is the latest company to establish a presence in Winston-Salem’s Regenerative Medicine Hub, a growing ecosystem for regenerative medicine research, development and manufacturing.

MIMEDX will have a laboratory in the RegeneratOR Innovation Accelerator in Winston-Salem’s Innovation Quarter. There the company will draw on the RegenMed Hub’s resources to advance the use of placental technologies in wound care and regenerative medicine.

MIMEDX

“As a growth company within the Innovation Accelerator, MIMEDX’s research, development and manufacturing teams can collaboratively advance the process efficiencies, biomanufacturing techniques and cutting-edge technologies required to drive innovation in regenerative medicine, specifically in the field of placental biologics,” said Robert B. Stein, M.D., Ph.D., president of regenerative medicine and biologics innovation at MIMEDX. “This opportunity furthers our ability to create and engineer products that address the unmet clinical needs of patients and providers and advance the next generation of therapies for a broad range of disease states.”

The company declined to say how many employees would be based in Winston-Salem or what its future staffing might be.

MIMEDX’s presence in the Innovation Accelerator will give it access to strategic partners, biomanufacturing equipment, technologies, industry expertise, talent, a training program and other resources. The Innovation Accelerator supports innovation from research to commercialization for startups, growth companies and established companies developing emerging technologies in regenerative medicine.

“We are looking forward to supporting MIMEDX through access to our Test Bed, which really offers up manufacturing-in-a-box solutions to optimize any manufacturing process with state-of-the-art equipment, technologies and resources,” said Anthony Atala, M.D., director of the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine (WFIRM).

WFIRM, a part of Wake Forest School of Medicine, is in the Innovation Quarter, and is the world’s largest institute of its kind. It employs more than 400 scientists and staff who translate scientific discoveries into clinical therapies involving more than 40 different tissues and organs.

Atala, an internationally recognized scientist in regenerative medicine, was recently appointed to MIMEDX’s new Regenerative Medicine Scientific Advisory Board, created to guide the company’s clinical product pipeline and support its focus on placental biologics innovation.

“The Regen Med Hub is a unique distinction and important opportunity for this region,” said Nancy Johnston, executive director of the North Carolina Biotechnology Center’s Piedmont Triad Office. “It is exciting to welcome new companies and see continued growth of this cluster in North Carolina.”

Regenerative medicine community grows

MIMEDX joins an expanding roster of about 30 bioscience companies that have established a presence in the Innovation Accelerator to gain access to the region’s resources in regenerative medicine.

“We believe this region has a lot to offer in terms of helping these companies be successful, and, at the same time, we can advance the regenerative medicine field nationally,” said Joshua Hunsberger, Ph.D., chief technology officer of the RegenMed Development Organization (ReMDO), the non-profit organization that runs the Innovation Accelerator.

Gary Green, Ed.D., chief operating officer of ReMDO, added, “Addressing manufacturing process optimization for companies in this space is the most critical need to enable these technologies to become widespread, affordable and the next standard of care.”

MIMEDX is a placental biologics company and a pioneer in placental tissue engineering. The company has distributed more than two million tissue allografts thus far, primarily to address the needs of patients with acute and chronic non-healing wounds, and is also advancing a late-stage biologics pipeline targeted at decreasing pain and improving function for patients with degenerative musculoskeletal conditions including knee osteoarthritis.

The company, headquartered in Marietta, Ga., was founded in 2008 and has about 800 employees. Its shares are publicly traded on the Nasdaq stock market under the ticker symbol MDXG.

(C) N.C. Biotech Center